Sunday, December 20, 2015

7. Lecturer
II/Lecturer II/Assistant Lecturer/Graduate Assistant. As I said last week,
comparing the British/Nigerian systems with the American system can be tricky
and can lead one fall into the pit of false equivalences, which I am sure I
have fallen into already. Well, in the British/Nigerian system, fresh Ph.D.’s
with no publication (especially in the humanities and in the social sciences)
begin their careers as Lecturer II,
move up to Lecturer I, to Senior Lecturer, then Reader, and finally to Professor. (People with a master’s
degree in the humanities and social sciences start their university teaching
careers as “assistant lecturers,”
and those with a bachelor’s degree start as “graduate assistants.”) Graduates of disciplines that require more
than four years to complete a degree, such as medicine, engineering, architecture,
law, etc. are usually a step or two higher than their peers in the humanities and
social sciences at the entry point.

In most American universities, Ph.D. is the minimum
qualification to teach; over 90 percent of university teachers have PhDs or other
kinds of terminal degrees. A few people with a master’s degree, as I pointed out last week, may be appointed as “lecturers” to teach lower-level
undergraduate courses. But, these days, because of the oversupply of PhDs in
the humanities and social sciences vis-à-vis available tenure-track jobs, many
PhDs end up being “lecturers.”

Graduate (teaching) assistants in American universities are not
employees of the university; they are transitory graduate (masters or PhD)
students who teach—or assist a full-time professor in teaching— undergraduates
while they earn their degrees in return for a tuition waiver and a monthly
stipend. So “graduate assistant” is not a university rank in American academe.
Nor is “assistant lecturer.” In any case, in undergraduate-only universities,
called “liberal arts colleges” here,
there are no graduate assistants since there are no graduate programs.

Now, since most fresh PhDs start as Lecturer II in Nigerian
universities and fresh PhDs start as Assistant Professor in American
universities, why did I equate the Nigerian/British “Senior Lecturer” rank with
the American “Assistant Professor” rank? First, I pointed out that equivalence
is tricky and isn’t exact because of the vast difference in the systems. For
one, there are only three ranks in the American professoriate (assistant,
associate and full professor) while there are several in Nigeria and Britain.

But the American doctoral education system, even in the
best-case scenarios, is longer, more intense, requires separate years of course
work AND research, and is structured in such a way that many Ph.D. candidates
leave their programs with substantial conference-paper presentations and
peer-reviewed journal articles--often enough to earn the position of
"Senior Lecturer" in the British and Nigerian systems. In many
programs, in fact, people are not allowed to graduate, even they have completed
their doctoral dissertations, until they’ve published in well-regarded
journals.

This is not the case in Nigeria. That’s why one Dr. Enoch
Opeyemi who falsely claims to have solved the Riemann Hypothesis said in a recent
interview that a Yale University PhD student who challenged and tore apart his
claims had no grounds to do so because PhD students don't publish in scholarly
outlets until they have defended their doctoral dissertations. That’s a lie. As
I pointed out in a Facebook comment, Opeyemi was only ignorantly externalizing
his Nigerian educational experience to America.

Even in the rare
instances where people graduate from their PhD programs without peer-reviewed publications in
America, by the time they are in the third or fourth years of their academic careers, most Assist
Professors in American universities can be equated with most ideal Senior
Lecturers in the British/Nigerian system. In research and comprehensive
universities in America, the consequence of not publishing and teaching is that
you will perish because you will be denied tenure and fired. In Nigeria, the
only consequence of not being a good researcher and teacher, in the best case,
is that you will stagnate in one rank.

I am aware that
because of the rise in publication fraud in Nigeria, where many lecturers
publish substandard, unpublishable nonsense in fraudulent “open-access”
journals, things have been muddied. I have seen people in the rank of Lecturer
II with 80 “publications,” 100 percent of which are in worthless, non-reviewed,
predatory, money-making, open-access “journals.” But that’s a topic for another
day. I am also aware that the internal politics of universities and departments
can cause worthy academics to slug in a rank because they are not in the good
graces of the wielders of influence.

8. Professor of the
practice/Clinical Professor. As far as I am aware, thisacademic position doesn’t exist in the British and Nigerian systems.
“Professor of the practice,” or “clinical professor” (sometimes called
“professor of professional practice”) is a professorial title given to people
with impressive accomplishments in and profound hand-on knowledge of a field,
even if such people don’t have more than a bachelor’s degree. They usually only
teach undergraduates and are not expected to be researchers.

The practice is intended to draw people with extensive
industry experience to the academe and to bridge the gap between the
"town" and the “gown.” This is especially common in such vocational
and skill-based courses as journalism, engineering, business, medicine, etc.,
but it can sometimes be found even in “intellectual” disciplines like
literature. For instance, the late Maya Angelou was a lifetime endowed professor of
American literature at Wake Forest University, even though she didn’t have a
bachelor’s degree.

This is unnecessary
in the (old) British/Nigerian system because people could attain the highest
rank in their academic careers with just a bachelor's degree. Wole Soyinka,
Chinua Achebe, JP Clark, etc. became professors (or, if you will, "full
professors") without Ph.D.’s. The National Universities Commission has,
however, now made it impossible for anybody without a Ph.D. to proceed beyond
the rank of "Senior Lecturer."

Americans also have what is called “research professors.” They are hired only to conduct and publish
research in high-impact outlets; they don’t teach any courses. Increasingly,
too, PhDs who are employed as “lecturers” in American universities are
called “teaching professors” to
differentiate them from lecturers who typically have only a master’s degree.

You may probably have heard of endowed professors (who can be
associate professors). Well, they are university teachers and researchers whose
salaries are paid by a wealthy philanthropist or a foundation after whom the
endowment is typically named, such as "Dangote Endowed Professor in
Entrepreneurship." It’s a great academic honor to be conferred an endowed
professorship.

Now, it is usual for the American media to refer to
President Barack Obama as a former “constitutional law professor” or simply as
a former “college professor.” Many people have asked me to clarify what that
means. Well, Obama’s official title at the University of Chicago Law School was
“Senior Lecturer” but, as you learned last week, Americans informally use the
term “professor” to refer to anybody who teaches in a university. According to
the University of Chicago Law School, Obama’s “Senior Lecturer” status was on
an adjunct basis, that is, it was part-time because he had a full-time job as a
lawyer and later as a politician.

“Like Obama, each of
the Law School's Senior Lecturers has high-demand careers in politics or public
service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as
a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a
full-time tenure-track position, but he declined,” the school said on its website. Obama
doesn’t have a Ph.D., but he has a Juris Doctor (JD) degree, a 3-year
professional doctorate required to practice law in the United States, which
isn’t the equivalent of a PhD, although JD holders can be appointed as
Assistant Professors. The equivalent of a PhD in law is the Doctor of Juridical
Science or the Doctor of the Science of Law, which is better known by the initialism
SJD, derived from the Latin Scientiae
Juridicae Doctor. (For more on this, see "Difference Between a Doctorate and a PhD")

9. “Academic staff”
versus “faculty.” In the British system, university teachers are
collectively called “academic staff.” That is why the name of the trade union
for Nigerian university teachers is called the Academic Staff Union of
Universities (ASUU). But in American English, the collective term for
university teachers is “faculty,” which in British English means a division of
a university that houses cognate subject areas, such as “Faculty of Arts,”
“Faculty of Science,” etc.

“Professors” and “faculty” are interchangeable terms in
American English. That’s why the American equivalent of the Nigerian Academic
Staff Union of Universities is called the Association of American University
Professors (AAUP), which is open to all people who teach in the university—be
they lecturers, adjuncts, visiting professors, tenure-track or tenured
professors.

In the American system, the term “staff” is used only for
people who don’t teach or research in the university, what Nigerian and British
English speakers call “non-academic staff.” So where the British and Nigerians
would say “academic and non-academic staff,” Americans would say “faculty and
staff.”

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). For more than 13 years, he wrote two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust). From November 2018, his political commentaries appear on the back page of the Nigerian Tribune on Saturday.In April 2014, Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.